body of literature produced by Vietnamese-speaking people, primarily in Vietnam. Like the river basins that have nourished Vietnam’s agricultural civilization for thousands of years, Vietnamese literature has been fed by two great tributaries: the indigenous oral literature and the written literature of Chinese influence. The oral poetry tradition...

best-loved poet of the Vietnamese and creator of the epic poem Kim van Kieu, written in chu-nom (southern characters). He is considered by some to be the father of Vietnamese literature. Nguyen Du passed the mandarin examinations at the age of 19 and succeeded to a modest military post under the Le dynasty. He served the Le rulers, as his family had...

Vietnamese dissident poet who composed some 700 poems in his head and committed them to memory during the roughly 27 years (1960–64, 1966–77, 1979–91) that he spent in labour camps and in prison, including 6 years (1979–85) in the infamous Hoa Lo prison, dubbed the Hanoi Hilton by American prisoners of war. Nguyen was first arrested in 1960 after he...

Vietnamese scholar who contributed to the popular usage of Quoc-ngu, a romanized system of transcribing the Vietnamese language devised by mid-17th-century Portuguese missionaries and further modified by Alexandre de Rhodes, a 17th-century French missionary. Cua helped make Quoc-ngu popular by employing it instead of the traditional system of Chinese...

Vietnamese poet and politician who was hailed as North Vietnam’s poet laureate and inspired generations of fellow Communist Party members with his popular propagandistic verse. An early convert to communism, he was arrested in 1939 for his political activities but escaped from prison in 1942 and joined the Viet Minh. To Huu was already known as a gifted...